Michigan State University interim President John Engler listens as he runs his first Michigan State University Board of Trustees meeting on campus in East Lansing, Mich., Friday, Feb 16, 2018.(Photo: Matthew Dae Smith, Lansing State Journal)

Again and again, he insisted this election was all about him — and in Michigan, at least, many of Donald Trump's critics, for once, took him at his word.

His name didn't appear on anyone's ballot. But unlike their counterparts in Missouri, Florida and Georgia, Michigan voters rejected Republican candidates who embraced, were embraced by, or simply had the bad luck to be on the same ticket, as the incumbent who carried their state's presidential vote two years ago.

The backlash was especially pronounced in suburban Detroit, where Democratic candidates angered by Trump's pledge to repeal Obamacare flipped two congressional seats Republicans had held for decades.

But Trump isn't the only spectator whose prospects were materially impacted by the mid-term election.

Among the winners and losers you may have overlooked:

Winners

• The Federalist Society: Founded in 1982, the society is a nationwide organization of conservative lawyers dedicated to incubating, cultivating and promoting originalist lawyers and judges in the mold of the late Antonin Scalia. When he ran for president in 2016, candidate Donald Trump promised that he would pick his U.S. Supreme Court nominees from a roster of candidates approved by the society, essentially outsourcing one of his most critical presidential prerogatives to an organization bankrolled by conservative industrialists like the Koch brothers, John Olin and Richard Scaife.

Trump's first two nominees, Neil Gorsuch and Bret Kavanaugh, were both products of that arrangement. By reinforcing their majority in the U.S. Senate, Republicans all but guaranteed swift confirmation of future Federalist Society-sanctioned nominees.

• Unemployment insurance victims: The Snyder administration has acknowledged that it denied jobless benefits to tens of thousands of Michigan residents after a faulty computer program falsely accused them of defrauding the state. Some were ordered to return benefits they had lawfully collected, along with penalties of up to 400%. But outgoing Attorney General Bill Schuette has vigorously challenged the victims' damage claims, arguing that they waited too long after the state made its bogus allegations to seek restitution.

The Michigan Supreme Court will decide any day whether the victims can pursue their claims. But even if justices buy Schuette's argument, the new Democratic governor and attorney general are expected to lobby for for an appropriation to compensate victims, some of whom were forced to declare bankruptcy after the state unjustly suspended their jobless benefits.

VPN founder Katie Fahey: Two days after the 2016 presidential election. Fahey, then 27, decided she wanted to take on gerrymandering in Michigan and asked Facebook friends to spread the word. Within 13 months, the all-volunteer army Fahey mustered had collected 425,000 signatures in support of a state constitutional amendment to place Michigan's redistricting process in the hands of an independent citizen's commission.

Now, after Tuesday's passage of Proposal 2, Fahey's Voters Not Politicians has both parties' full attention. Michiganders surely will be hearing more from and about her in future election cycles.

Judicial independence: Two incumbent Republican state Supreme Court justices were up for re-election Tuesday. But only one of them, Kurt Wilder, had his party's enthusiastic support.

A more recently appointed GOP justice, Elizabeth Clement, angered many in her party when she and another Republican, Justice David Viviano, joined their two Democratic justices in two 4-3 decisions earlier this year. The first upheld the Ann Arbor school board's authority to bar firearms from the district's public school campuses. The second paved the way for Tuesday's approval of a constitutional amendment that wrests political redistricting from Republican legislative control.

Wilder, who bowed to his party's druthers (if not the demands of the law) by dissenting in both cases, was rewarded with an 11th-hour infusion of campaign cash from the state Republican Party. The party denied Clement the same support and left her name off mailings and door cards distributed to reliable Republican voters.

But the upshot of this blatant favoritism was that both candidates achieved unusual notoriety — Clement as an impartial judge willing to rule without fear or favor, Wilder as a political hack who used his position to shill for his party.

When the votes were in, Clement won an eight-year term, and Wilder, whose incumbent status should have given him a prohibitive advantage over both his Democratic opponents, lost to first-time candidate Megan Cavanagh.

But the real winner was the Supreme Court itself, which is trying to assert its independence from the other two branches of government.

Losers

Right to Life: For more than a generation, Right to Life has fielded one of the most potent grassroots armies in Michigan politics, electing a long line of governors, appellate judges and and legislative majorities faithful to its anti-abortion agenda.

But just as a new U.S. Supreme Court majority seems poised to give states more leeway in restricting access to abortion, the pro-life lobby is losing its hammerlock on Michigan government.

Although it clings to pro-life majorities in the state Senate and state Supreme Court, Right to Life Tuesday lost critical allies in the governor's mansion, the attorney general's office, the state House and the judiciary. With a pro-choice Democratic governor and attorney general at the helm, it's unlikely RTL could muster enough votes to re-criminalize abortion here even if the high court gave states the option to do so.

John Engler: Democrat reformers captured both of the Michigan State University trustee seats at stake in Tuesday's election, giving their party a decisive advantage on what had been an evenly divided governing board. That may spell an earlier-than-expected exit for Engler, the former GOP governor who was tapped to be MSU's interim president after the Larry Nassar scandal.

Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard: A former Republican state senator, Bouchard has become used to attracting more votes than any other Oakland County politician since assuming the sheriff's job in 1999. If County Executive L. Brooks Patterson had relinquished his post before now, Bouchard would have been the prohibitive favorite to replace him.

But as Patterson, 79, has lingered, Oakland has been trending steadily Democratic. Tuesday's election may have been a turning point, with Democrats seizing all four of the county's congressional seats and an 11-10 majority on the Board of County Commissioners.

If he runs for the top job when Patterson's current term ends in 2020, Bouchard will be swimming against a powerful Democratic current.

Your car's shock and struts: Gov.-elect Whitmer ran (and won) on a pledge to fix the damn roads, even if that means higher taxes and fees to generate revenue for a multi-billion-dollar repair backlog.

But unlike Rick Snyder, who assumed office in tandem with Republican legislative majorities largely committed to his tax-cutting agenda, Whitmer will confront skepticism from a House and Senate that remain firmly in GOP control.

For the time being, the money you pay for bad roads will continue to flow to your favorite auto mechanic, not the infrastructure bank Whitmer wants to establish.